glaring like a wildcat, saw the knobbed, bare shoulders and coppery,
brute faces of his crew, saw Sutton turning back. He had no weapon, but
he armed himself. He dragged the big green joss from its niche, lamps,
incense, and all, twirled it over his head, exultant, transformed with
berserk fury, shouting some free battle cry of his own--and met them.
Thereafter the place went dark in a babble of shrieks, and we dropped
like slugs from a garden wall.
So we brought Chris Wickwire home again--what was left of him....
There was small joy in that homecoming, you can figure. Dawn broke
weeping as we were hurrying aboard with our unconscious burden. The
reaches of the river were beginning to show slaty downstream and a
little damp wind running with the day was like a chill after fever,
unfriendly and comfortless. The lamp in the chief engineer's cabin had
paled from saffron to citrine in the morning light when the officers of
the _Moung Poh_ took stock of themselves once more, and of each other
and an ill prospect.
Wickwire had neither spoken nor stirred, though his breathing was
regular and he seemed to have taken no immediate hurt from his fall
except the reopening of an old, ragged wound above the ear. Captain Raff
had done the bandaging: he stood back from the last neat pleat.
"A clip over the head, as you say," he observed, addressing me pointedly
while he wiped his clumsy great hands that yet had wrought as tenderly
as a woman's. "And pretty lucky at that. H'll do well enough now till we
get a doctor. You better dig out after one yourself--try the Port
Office; they'll have to be notified anyway, I judge, when he wakes."
We looked at the shell of a man on the bunk. "It's got to be the--the
hospital, then?" I asked.
"I believe that's what they call it," said Raff gruffly.
"Beg pardon, sir," put in Sutton very quietly, "but we'll notify no
office and no doctor either--not till we sheer have to."...
The mate was planted by the door where he had been waiting in silence
while we two ministered to the chief. Raff had ignored him since our
return, but he eyed him now sternly up and down. Most people would have
eyed him so, for he made rather an appalling figure, streaked and
stained, with his wounds half dried upon him, a raking cut along one
cheek and his coat hanging in shreds.
"What in Hull t' Halifax are you talkin' about?"
Sutton drew from his pocket a certain familiar object, a small,
black-bound volume. "There was a chap in a book I read, sir--"
The captain regarded him, purpling.
"Is this more of your wonderful notions?"
"It's my plan to save Chris Wickwire," returned the mate firmly, "and
I'm bound to try it on. Just as it says here. 'Sirs,' it says, 'sirs, I
will practice on this drunken man--'"
He held out the shabby octavo and, considering it again with heightened
amazement, of a sudden I knew where I had seen it before.
"Why," I cried, "that's the Book you got for the chief. I can tell from
the gilt cross on the cover. That's Wickwire's Bible!"
"It is the book I got for the chief," he said slowly, making plain the
case against himself, "and it has a cross on the cover. But it's no
Bible. Only an old collection of plays I bought to gammon him with.
Shakespeare wrote it.
"There was no cover to it either, so I bought an old cover off a hymn
book and pasted it over. You can see for yourselves--the cross is upside
down." And, in fact, that we might miss nothing he showed us the cover,
wrong way with the pages. "I remember the chief, taking lessons from me
but having only the cross to go by, d'y'see--the chief used always to
hold the book wrong side up. I remember," he added with an odd smile,
quite mirthless--"I remember how I laughed. I used to think it funny."
Someway that made the captain froth. Since our invasion of Colootullah
he had been increasingly rigid toward the mate, and here he broke out.
"So we've had nothin' but your damn' lyin' tricks from the start! All
the time you was readin' to him--"
"Only gammon, sir. I used to experiment on him with choice bits--calling
'em truth and Scripture."
"And now you're after more fool games of the same kind! Can't you look
what's come of 'em? Look there!" He pointed to the stark figure.
"I see what's come, sir," said Sutton, and though he was white under his
stains he never flinched. "And Wickwire, he saw what _would_ come. He
was trying to stop me the night I dropped him into the river--when we
quarreled. Because, d'y'see, from fooling with the works of life just to
learn how they're made I'd begun fooling with the works of hell. And he
had found me out."
"Ah," said Raff, with one of his rare flashes. "_That_ was how you knew
the road to Li Chwan's!"
"To Li Chwan's--and--other places. I've been hitting it pretty regular
for six months or so. The chief tried to save me, but I wouldn't
hearken, and there, as you say--there's the result. It's just as if he'd
done it all as a sacrifice, to show me. It's just as if--as if he'd paid
for mine with the price of his own immortal soul!"...
We stared at him, a tattered ruin but an upstanding youngster, and we
could sense no flaw in him now. He had come to grips with raw truth for
once without failing--not without a falter, you understand, for he had
to put aside a boy's pride and a last illusion in himself--but
clear-eyed, the straight way, as every man likes to think he might have
done in his own youth.
"Well," said Raff at last. "What's your notion?" Sutton drew a deep
breath.
"You know, sir, the chief never took any note of time. One day or
another--one month or another, it was all alike to him. Well, here it
is: Why can't we strike out these seven weeks and three days from his
memory--as if they never had been? We're fixed just as we were when we
lost him. He's in his own bed, the ship's in the same berth, just
coaled: same weather, same crew, same folk about him--same everything.
He wakes up--wouldn't he think the whole mess had been a dream?...
Wouldn't he? Couldn't we make him, just as they did with
the Johnny here?" He hammered the book for emphasis. "_'Would not the
beggar then forget himself?'_"
We winked as it burst upon us. Here was one beggar who had forgotten
himself, anyway: his vanity, his posing, his weakness, in the fervor of
a real idea.
"Perhaps there's something in make-believe after all--some merit.
Perhaps it's got some truth in it too. It mightn't work, but I feel it
must and will. I got the tip from the very book I gammoned him with,
from the very passage he must have marked himself at random--d'y'see?
And if he should come right--"
"Whist!" breathed the captain. "He's stirrin' now!"
The lank form on the bunk had moved. The bandaged head turned, and Chris
Wickwire looked up from his pillow. His gaze traveled slowly over the
bare, familiar details of the cabin, the racks and lockers, the deck
beams above, the panels on the bulkhead, his own spare garments on their
hooks--passed over our huddled group by the door and rested at the open
port, its brass rim shining with the new daylight. He lay so for a time,
tossed a little restlessly, and seemed to seek something. And then--
"Whaur's that pipe?" he muttered.
Our hearts stood still....
"Whaur's that blisterin' pipe?" he demanded, and raised himself with an
effort, groped along the shelf beside him, found what he wanted by the
tobacco jar, and proceeded leisurely to ram and to charge--his old clay
cutty!
Raff had dragged Sutton and his tatters into the thwart-ship passage,
out of sight, but I was clinging in the doorway when the dour old eye
nailed me.
"Feeling better, chief?" I managed somehow to gulp. "You got quite a
bump last night. Your head'll be sore for a bit--and--and the captain
will want to know right away if the bandage is comfortable."
He considered me a space.
"Whaur's the mate?" he asked, and added quickly: "Did he go ashore?"
"No, sir. He stayed to tend you. He says he's lost his taste for shore
leave, anyhow." I gasped, for Sutton's hand had caught mine in the
passage, and it nearly crushed my fingers. "He says--he says he'll wait
till you can go with him if you like."
Wickwire paused as he was lighting his pipe.
"Does he say that?" he queried, in a tone you would never have thought
possible on those grim lips. "Fetch him here to me, will ye now?"
I stumbled away blindly. When I returned some minutes later he was
propped quite comfortably at the end of the bunk.
"Beg pardon, chief--" I began.
"Hey?"
"Mr. Sutton can't come just now. I--I didn't care to disturb him--"
"How's that?"
"Well, it seems--the fact is--I--I left him in his cabin on his knees,
and it looked--anyway it seemed to me as if he might, perhaps,
be--praying!"
For the first time in my knowledge of him, his normal self, the chief
smiled, and it was like the struggling ray of early sun that pierces the
gray dawn. I should have left him then with that last glint of a picture
to close the affair, and with Sutton's last word of it in my mind.
"He's forgotten!" he had cried to me, in a clear bell note. "We did make
him forget!"
I say I should have gone away with that image and that word. But just at
the instant I saw a curious thing--and heard another. From the spot
where Sutton had dropped it, Chris Wickwire had retrieved the book. He
opened the volume on his knee and turned it around and over with a
gesture entirely casual.
"Aye," he said, as he settled himself contentedly on his pillow.
"Aye--well, I'll just sit here with this for a while. It's a grand book,
beyond the pen o' men an' angels; I often wunner how I got along without
one. Ye've no notion what comfort I've found just to sit an' haud in my
twa hands such a staff o' immortal truth!"...
Had he forgotten? Had he anything or any need to forget? I could not
tell: but this I know and this I saw while he twinkled at me through a
puff of smoke before I fled from the doorway, that the book on his knee
as he turned it and rippled its worn pages--the book, I say, was _right
side up_!
AMOK
Merry saw how the thing was done one steamy hot day at Palembang, and he
saw quite stark and plain. He had a first balcony seat to the
performance, as you might say, for he was leaning from a raised and
shaded veranda on the river street when it happened just below him.
Also, by some chance or other, he was almost completely sober at the
time. And this is the thing the sobered Merry saw:
From a doorway just across sprang suddenly out and down to the muddy
level a little stout-shouldered half-naked Malay with a face mottled and
bluish, with foam on his lip a creese in his hand. Forthright he drove
into the crowd like a reaper into standing grain. His blade rose and
fell in a crimson flicker, and he strode over the bodies of two victims
before the people were aware of him and fled streaming through alleys
and bolt holes. Then the terrible hoarse cry of the man hunt began to
muster, and furious swart figures to start back out of the mass and to
line the course with bright points of steel. The murderer neither paused
nor turned aside, but held straight on, hewing steadily and silently,
until the weapons bristled thick about him and he went down at last like
a malignant slug under a tumble of stinging wasps.
Merry resumed breathing with a conscious effort and loosed his clutch of
the balcony rail....
"What--was that?" he wanted to know.
A stolid and rather shabby client of the Dutch marine persuasion drew
stolidly on a cheroot and craned over to count the huddled bundles that
marked the madman's path.
"Oh, it iss nothing," observed this judicious person, who might have
been mate, or such, of a country ship. "He got four only. Sometimes they
kill eight--twelve--even more, till they get themselves killed. That
fellow was just a common fellow."
"But why--what was he after?"
"Oh, it iss just going amok, you know. That iss a habit wit' the Malay
folk. I have seen them often."
Still Mr. Merry desired light.
"How can I say?" returned the other. "A native iss always a native,
except when he iss only a man an' a dam' fool. Perhaps his woman has
gone bad on him or he has played his last copper doit at gambling. Maybe
he has crazied himself wit' opium or bhang. Maybe he iss just come to a
finish, you know?"
"A finish?" stammered Merry.
"Where he has no more use: where he gets sorry wit' the world an' wants
to die quick. So he takes his knife an' runs amok to stab so many people
as he can, an' he don't care a dam' if only he makes a big smash. It is
like a sport, truly."
"Yes," said Merry. "Very like a sport."
Thereupon he gave pious thanks that he owned no share in the fantastic
human chemistry that could produce such results. It was the sharpest
reminder of essential racial differences. It made him feel sick and
shaky, and since he knew only the simple cure for ills of body as of
mind, he applied himself so earnestly that within half an hour he felt
nothing at all, and the proprietor of the verandaed house on the river
street had him thrown into a barge, where he slept with the flies
crawling over his beard.
Afterward he recovered sufficiently to get himself out of Palembang, and
after that out of Muntok and Batavia and Banjermassin and other places
where he had no ostensible business to be. On his road he continued to
encounter divers strange sights and incidents peculiar to the latitude
and the social layers through which he moved; but the affair was a
warning to him. He had been shocked. He had been very deeply shocked,
and he was always careful never to let himself get quite so sober
again--a development of the simple system whereby he avoided too vivid a
view of local color while he wandered on--aimlessly, as well as anyone
might judge--farther and farther downhill over the curve of the earth.
Now, it has been observed that a chap who starts downhill through the
Archipelago commonly comes to an end of his journeying soon, and
sometimes even sooner. The climate affords what you may call a ready
accelerator, and so do the fever and the sun and the quality of the
drink and other amusements prevailing in those parts. And often, if his
steps stray a bit off the beaten track, he is likely to meet some kindly
guide, black or brown or even white, perhaps, who bobs up in a quiet
corner to point out a short cut. But though Merry took no heed of his
steps in the least, and though he went quartering very far wide on that
great thoroughfare which reaches from Singapore to Torres Strait along
the midrib of the world, yet he kept on going for quite a while: and the
reasons therefor were curious and well worthy of note.
To begin with, he had brought along a fair constitution and a stomach
that was not so much a stomach as a chemical retort--an advantage to be
envied by kings. He carried a loose, limp, and rubbery frame well suited
to the uses of a long-distance drunkard. He was by nature as mild and
harmless a creature as ever tangled himself in a fool's quest. And
finally he owned a gift, a certain special personal gift of the kind
that tends universally to maintain a fixed percentage for the man alive
over what he is worth when dead.
Such a provision is not so easily come by. Very able citizens have
lacked it. Many an eminent explorer, many a devoted pioneer, has found
his eminence and his devotion outbalanced in the primitive scale by the
value of his trouser buttons. It is singular to reflect what potential
marvels, what captains and leaders among men, have been knifed for the
beers; or elsewhere even broiled and eaten and complained of at
dessert--some being tough and some lacking flavor.
Merry was none of these sorts, but he had an odd juggling knack of his
fingers.
It was a sketchy enough knack at best. Heaven knew where he had acquired
it, just as Heaven was left the responsibility of knowing most facts
about Merry, anyhow. And certainly that was never discovered--no more
nearly than his proper name, nor the meaning of the upright wrinkle
between his brows like the dent of an ax, nor what conceivable things he
had done or been or wanted that had landed him among the islands.
Only there you were. Give the fellow a wisp of silk and some brass
bracelets or mango seeds, or such, and he would squat by the wayside or
in the shade of a hut or the cabin flares of a native prau and proceed
to work miracles.
He could make an egg to vanish and pluck it again from your left ear,
and he could mold a kerchief between his big, soft hands until it
produced a live lizard, which presently turned to a tame lorikeet, which
sat up and dratted your eyes in good set Malay. He drew chinking coins
out of space. He stood a plate on his nose and caught it on his calf,
kept six rings accurately flying, grew flowers from a paper spill and
butterflies from a kanari nut, and on occasion--if he was not
absolutely petrified and could still see the mark--would even undertake
to sink half a dozen daggers within the space of a hand print on the
opposite wall: and would do it, too, with the utmost speed and
precision.
Accomplishments of this kind were his passport, good any day for a lift,
a lodging, or a load from the most unlikely people, for they set him
apart in cult of conjurers and jesters that has been privileged always
and everywhere.
And so, past all the usual land-falls and long past the tables of
mortality for persons of his class and condition, he did keep going on.
He kept on after his clothes had fallen to ruin and his face had turned
the tint of seaweed; after he had lost most of the pretensions of a
white man, his shoes and his shirt. And in due course he arrived at
Zimballo's, where he lost the little property left to him and the shreds
of his pride, which every man has whether aware of it or not and which
he loses last of all....
Here again was an eastern city--not Palembang, though between two winks
you scarce could tell it from that or a dozen other ports: the same hive
of mats and slats, of fishing poles and cigar boxes, like a metropolis
devised by ingenious small children; with the same smells which remain
the only solid memorials; with the same swarm of pullulating humanity
and the same crowding junks and praus, and now and then the
far-venturing ships of recognized flags, sometimes as many as two or
three at once; with the same yellows and browns and clays against
shifting greens and eternal distant blues--all hazed with the same
molten light.
But in its own ways the city is different and remarkable. It is a
falling-off place. It is the eddy in a stream. At its roadstead the
trickle of traffic turns back and sheers aside from a shallow sea of
uncharted and unprofitable dangers: one of the big, blank spaces.
It has some scores of Europeans, who linger as official or accidental
units in the population. It has some hundreds of Eurasians, who occur as
improper fractions of varying hue. It has a season of the east monsoon
when there is no longer any steaminess in the heat, nor any muddiness
underfoot, nor any escape from pestilential wind and pervading dust:
dust of the roads and dust of the seared rice fields, and crumbled
refuse heaps and dust of a scorching hinterland; until a man's soul is
changed in him, as you might say, to a portion of immortal thirst.
And also by necessary logic it has Zimballo's.
To this institution, one evening in the dry weather, came Mr. Merry,
making what speed he could and clinging to the handrail all the way up
from the landing while he caught his breath and stared painfully about.
Below the point he saw the harbor like a sheet of crinkled copper.
Overhead arched a coppery dome. To seaward he could gaze down a vista of
rocky and deserted islets resembling slag heaps, where the sinking sun
showed like a red-hot spot in the huge, coppered oven in which he found
himself. He had been traveling since dawn; he had been without liquor
for something like twelve hours; and as he resumed his struggle toward
the clutter of tinroofed sheds and arbors which marked his goal he
achieved in his mind a dim but quite definite conviction--that hell
could hold few surprises for him now, and earth none at all....
But therein he erred.
"Where is the price?" demanded Zimballo, and when Merry laid down a
single piece of silver the international ruffian shook his crop head.
"No go," he stated.
"It's all I have," said Merry.
"It ain' enough," decided Zimballo, eying him.
In fact, Mr. Merry made an odd figure of a customer. He wore a coolie's
grass hat with a pointed crown. About his body hung an old duck jacket,
so rotted with rust and mildew as to lend scant anchorage for one brass
safety pin. His feet were graced with a pair of aboriginal sandals. It
was true he still retained the essential garment, as the frayed ends
above his ankles were there to prove. But for political reasons he had
swathed himself mid-about with a striped Malay sarong, which is half a
skirt and half a sash: whereat Zimballo took purpled offense.
This rogue, himself a mongrel grown fat in the slums of three
continents, held starchy notions on the subject of pants.
"A drink," he said with intention, "will be half a dollar. If you don'
got it, get out. And if you _do_ got it, pay quick and get out any'ow!"
"I--I haven't it; no. But for any sakes, man," gasped Merry between
blackened lips, "you wouldn't turn a chap off! I'm done and double-done.
I been knocked out, with the sun and all.... See here now. Give me the
worth o' that."
"I give you nothing. I don' like your looks. Why, even in my back room,"
puffed Zimballo, "the half-castes and orang sirani, they come here as
_zaintlemen_ only!"
He loomed indignant under the glow of his fine oil lamps, just lighted
against the dusk, in his fine main shed which it was the sentimental
care of his life to run as close as might be on the model of a Levantine
waterside dive.
There is a breed, or a type, whose destiny is to go about the world
purveying garlic, cheap food, infamous wines, and more or less
flea-infested hospitality in all manner of queer corners, by ice-bound
bay or coral strand. So they did in the time of the Ph[oe]nicians, and
so they still do, and that part is right enough. No one could have
found fault with Zimballo's zinc bar, nor his highboy stacked to the
ceiling with multicolored bottles, nor his tattered billiard table, nor
his battered metal furniture. The flaring, red cotton covers, the gilt
mirrors, and the crude prints of obscure royalties; the blue-glass
siphons and the pinky lace curtains: these he had found some heroic
means of transplanting, like the fixtures of a faith.
Meanwhile the East is the East and a good deal of a fixture itself, and
behind his drawn jalousies and his masking vines Zimballo served the
local devil quite successfully.
Not the red and lusty wickedness of other climes, but a languid sort,
thriving in a reek of musk and raw Chinese apple blossom, of stale
cooking and incense and stifled rooms and poisonous sweet champagne, as
dreary as the click of fan-tan cash and the drag of silks and the voices
of a cheeping bird cage that circulated through the secret mazes of the
establishment day and night. An unsmiling devil--in the flesh and on the
spot very well represented you would have said, by one of the billiard
players, a tall, yellow, corpsy individual who had remarked the stir of
Merry's arrival and who now lounged about the table.
"What's the row, Zimballo?" he drawled. "Let's have a share if there's
any fun going. My word--is that a friend of yours?"
"No friend--Cap'n Silva, sir!" protested the hotel keeper, rubbing his
hands in a fluster. It annoyed him vehemently that he had not banished
this disreputable stranger at sight. "Ope to die, sir--I never see 'im
before!"
Other guests had begun to gather at the promise of diversion: a
bat-eared clerk from the Consulate office, a broken engineer, a benzoin
trader looking professionally neat and antiseptic, and two or three
loafers looking considerably less so--but all entire gentlemen,
unpatched, and all expectant of Silva's lead and grateful for it.
"Well, well. A new specimen, then." The captain was pleased to assume a
scientific interest as he propped himself on his cue and waved aside a
wreath of cigarette smoke. "And a blasted poor specimen at that, I'd
say.... Now which tribe would you take him to be, just as he stands?"